Immersive Lab

Showcasing how art and science can inform each other in the investigation of immersive and interactive media, the Immersive Lab serves as a platform for artistic and scientific experimentation and creation. Throughout the project, artists, scientists, curators and educators collaborated on creations and exhibitions. The resulting works show how experience and communication affect our perception and the application of digital media.

The list of works in the exhibition includes: Connect (by Simon Schaerlaeken and Donald Glowinski), Multiple Bodies, Super Egos & Virtual Selves (by Simon Schaerlaeken, Bruno Herbelin, Oliver Kannape, Jan Schacher, Daniel Bisig), Coexistence (by Nadine Cocina and Romana Sprenger), Seen (by Célia Bétourné and Louis Cortes), Les Mains Négatives (by Anne Dubos and Jan Schacher).

About Multiple Bodies, Super Egos & Virtual Selves

A swipe of the arm. A faint touch. Who was that? Is that? By enabling visitors to experience the unusual sensations provoked by bodily illusions, this artistic work explores the delicate boundary between our seemingly stable percept of an embodied self, and a self that is disrupted by technology. The installation is equally inspired by clinical observations of disembodiment, presence hallucinations, and other altered states of consciousness – and experimental neuroscientific investigations using virtual reality and robotics bringing to surface the fundamental brain mechanisms underlying bodily self-consciousness.

Installation made in collaboration with the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience of Prof. Olaf Blanke at EPFL and with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.